here: Every cell a densely populated ocean. I’d be interested to know whether wave mechanics can be used to interpret many of the behaviours of life forms.

Last Friday night, I was crammed tight into the Toronto subway along with thousands of other warm bodies moving slowly north. The train slowed to inchworm pace and we received a message: Personal injury at track level. You know as well as I do what that means. Everyone did. Thousands of us were dumped out against a chill north wind at the city’s central intersection (Yonge & Bloor), milling around, waiting for shuttle buses that rarely came. A great opportunity for violence, right? You know, competition, selfish genes, survival of the fittest … Nah. There was none. A few crazy people were yelling at themselves and a splitting couple was yelling at each other. People passively cleared whatever space was Read More ›

A friend writes to advise me of a “vicious” review by Scott Atran of Sam Harris’s latest book, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values in the most recent issue of National Interest, which – he tells me – otherwise focuses on foreign and defense policy. Atran, an anthropologist connected with U Michigan, doesn’t like Harris anyway, I gather, because the latter wouldn’t dismiss the effects of laboratory research into telepathy and telekinesis. Atran, for his own reasons, doesn’t think that “science” is in any position to determine morality. Harris tells us: “I find reasons for hope” because “moral progress seems to me unmistakable. . . . Consider the degree to which racism in the United States has Read More ›

(targeting customers of the more familiar bodice-ripper and cherry-chomp brands)

David Brooks, who used to know tripe when he saw it, now gives us this, praising pop evolutionary psychology:

Brain science helps fill the hole left by the atrophy of theology and philosophyA core finding of this work is that we are not primarily the products of our conscious thinking. The conscious mind gives us one way of making sense of our environment. But the unconscious mind gives us other, more supple ways. The cognitive revolution of the past thirty years provides a different perspective on our lives, one that emphasizes the relative importance of emotion over pure reason, social connections over individual choice, moral intuition over abstract logic, perceptiveness over I.Q. It allows us to tell a different sort of success story, an inner story to go along with the conventional surface one.

Yes. There is a name for that: fascism

Fascism, at heart, is a belief that surrendering to an emotion engendered by an idea can bring about an earthly utopia. In politics, the idea is usually appears as a messianic leader, but in current psychology, anyone with some neuroscience training can generate these visions using machines, drugs, or narratives that get published as research on human subjects.

And it is always very difficult, at best, to explain to people that, on Earth, utopia is the trade name for hell.

Anyway, Brooks unintentionally outlines the problem better than any detractor could by retailing this loathsome love story: Read More ›

I do enjoy reading ID’s most vehement critics, both in formal publications (such as books and papers) and on the, somewhat less formal, Internet blogosphere. Part of the reason for this is that it gives one something of a re-assurance to observe the vacuous nature of many of the critics’ attempted rebuttals to the challenge offered to neo-Darwinism by ID, and the attempted compensation of its sheer lack of explicative power by the religious ferocity of the associated rhetoric (to paraphrase Lynn Margulis). The prevalent pretense that the causal sufficiency of neo-Darwinism is an open-and-shut case (when no such open-and-shut case for the affirmative exists) never ceases to amuse me.

One such forum where esteemed critics lurk is the Panda’s Thumb blog. A website devoted to holding the Darwinian fort, and one endorsed by the National Center for Selling Evolution Science Education (NCSE). Since many of the Darwinian heavy guns blog for this website, we can conclude that, if consistently demonstrably faulty arguments are common play, the front-line Darwinism defense lobby is in deep water.

Recently, someone referred me to two articles (one, two) on the Panda’s Thumb website (from back in 2007), by Arthur Hunt (professor in Department of Plant and Soil Sciences at the University of Kentucky). The first is entitled “On the evolution of Irreducible Complexity”; the second, “Reality 1, Behe 0” (the latter posted shortly following the publication of Behe’s second book, The Edge of Evolution).

The articles purport to refute Michael Behe’s notion of irreducible complexity. But, as I intend to show here, they do nothing of the kind!

Read More ›

From the Templeton Foundation we learn that the big crackdown paper, taking dead aim at aimed at science teachers who have enough sense to doubt Darwinism has morphed into a Templeton-funded book. Think anti-evolution teaching is confined to schools in certain regions? Think again. Plutzer says he and Berkman find that “active proponents of creationism as science can be found in every state, even in fairly cosmopolitan school districts.” While it is true that those who reject evolution tend to find jobs in more socially conservative school districts, where they receive parental backing, it’s also the case that teachers who experience the most pressure teach in districts with large and clashing constituencies of conservative Protestants and pro-evolution opponents. Says Plutzer, Read More ›

That was the title of one of my recent lectures at our church. You can download the PowerPoint presentation here.

Cautiously introduced as a “guest voice” in the Washington Post, commentator David Klinghoffer talks about Alfred Russel Wallace, co-theorist of natural selection, as a voice for healing the current social divide between the elite sinless Monkeyman and the traditional popular Adam: Pro-Darwinian educators were frustrated this week to find that most public high school biology instructors in their teaching do not wholeheartedly endorse evolution. The teachers reflect a stubborn division across American culture. For the past three decades, Americans have been locked into a basically unchanging split of views on the subject, with only about 16 percent believing in Darwin’s theory of unguided evolution. Darwinism is, at bottom, a theory about us (trousered apes, meat puppets, etc.). Now, obviously, when Read More ›

This is one of those stories about which one says, I wouldn’t have seen it if I hadn’t believed it.

These three Ohio bucks somehow locked antlers while battling near a small creek. When one deer slid into a shallow pool, it sealed the fate for all three, who drowned together, antlers still locked. Steve Hill talked to the men who found and recovered the deer and their combined 400-inches of antler to bring you the story of this sad, almost poetic scene.

Some said, heartlessly, that they’d make a nice chandelier. Others asked sensible questions:

Wildlife biologists are taught that anthropomorphism—endowing the animals they study with human qualities—is not good science. Yet, says Mike Tonkovich, deer project leader for the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, “I can’t help wondering what was that third buck thinking? Whatever possessed him to get engaged when the two were already entangled?”

Mmmm … Stupidity? He wasn’t thinking anything? Question: How many times has this happened when no human was around to see it?

But others outgassed on Darwinism: Read More ›

I would not have known, if I hadn’t read Suzan Mazur’s The Altenberg 16 (on the growing collapse of Darwinism): While speaking at Manhattan’s Ethical Culture Society meeting one Saturday night (March 12, 2008) on his book, The God Delusion, as she tells it, Richard Dawkins

admitted to being “guilty” of viewing Darwinism as a kind of religion and vowed to “reform”

Having a natural interest in reform, I would be most interested to learn of any evidence for this one. But now this, from Mazur:

(no one was allowed to tape Dawkins’ confession, however, with organizers of the event threatening to march offenders around the corner to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints). (p 97)

Can’t help wondering whether the warning was principally aimed at Mazur. Certainly, in her book, she manages to put a number of Darwin devotees and their enablers, whom the New York Times considers important authorities for no particularly good reason, in a much less flattering light than they are used to.

It seems that Mazur had met up with Dawkins the night before at a book signing. On self-organization theory (to which Mazur is partial), he noted, Read More ›

Here. He was briefly a born-again Christian as a youth, but

… my sister’s husband (an aspiring psychologist whose preference for graduate school over employment my father wasn’t wild about) suggested I read Beyond Freedom and Dignity by B.F. Skinner. As intellectuals go, Skinner was pretty dismissive of intellectuals — at least the ones who blathered unproductively about “freedom” and “dignity,” the ones he considered insufficiently hard-nosed and scientific.Look, he said, people are animals. Kind of like laboratory rats, except taller. Their behavioral proclivities are a product of the positive and negative reinforcements they’ve gotten in the past. Want to build a better society? Discern the links between past reinforcement and future proclivity, and then adjust society’s disbursement of reinforcements accordingly. No need to speculate about unobservable states of mind or ponder the role of “free will” or any other imponderables. Epistemology, phenomenology, metaphysics, and 25 cents will get you a ride on the New York subway.

This was my kind of intellectual — an anti-intellectual intellectual! I became an ardent Skinnerian.

However, that wore off, so then this: Read More ›

From the Templeton Foundation we learn that the big crackdown paper, morphed into a Templeton-funded book taking dead aim at aimed at science teachers who have enough sense to doubt Darwinism. Think anti-evolution teaching is confined to schools in certain regions? Think again. Plutzer says he and Berkman find that “active proponents of creationism as science can be found in every state, even in fairly cosmopolitan school districts.” While it is true that those who reject evolution tend to find jobs in more socially conservative school districts, where they receive parental backing, it’s also the case that teachers who experience the most pressure teach in districts with large and clashing constituencies of conservative Protestants and pro-evolution opponents. Says Plutzer, “In Read More ›

Michael Flannery, author of Alfred Russel Wallace’s Theory of Intelligent Evolution and Alfred Russel Wallace: A Rediscovered Life , sent this note re the latter book: John Landon has just posted a review of my Alfred Russel Wallace: A Rediscovered Life chiding me for not following the Roy Davies Darwin Conspiracy thesis that Charles “stole” Al’s theory of natural selection.I have explained my skepticism over this persistent plagiarism charge thoroughly in the book, not the least of which is that to make the accusation stick you really have to see both theories as one in the same, and I believe (as do most scholars) that closer examination reveals they are not. In fact, Wallace’s version appears on the face of Read More ›

Not for the faint-hearted….a fascinating clip on the work of Dutch kinetic sculptor Theo Jansen who has created his own brand of beach creatures.  With over twenty years of arduous work under his belt, Jansen started by pulling his ‘offspring creatures’ up into the wind, then gave them propellers and wings/sails to increase their running power.  The commentator on this clip notes that: “through hours of experimenting and trial and error, Theo’s designs are becoming more and more independent”. Jansen’s own conclusion? “What I have found about this experience of making new forms of life is that you discover all the problems that the real creator must have had creating this world” And these are not even thinking, autonomous beings!  Read More ›